The Death of His Love

Death took her one day, without warning. She was young and beautiful when she died.

The man sat on his bed, mourning. He was dirty, unwashed, as were his clothes and his sheets. His hair was knotted, his beard uneven, and his eyes reddened. He tried to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come; his orbs felt dry and gritty in their sockets.

“She was the only woman I’ve ever loved,” he whispered. No one answered. “She was the only woman I’ve ever loved!” he screamed, pounding his chest with his fists. There was only silence.

He sat there hugging himself, unmoving, until he admitted, “She never knew how much I loved her.” His lips trembled and his body shook violently.

“Now, she’ll never knowI loved her at all." That was the truth. For the man loved this one woman with all his heart, but he never told her how he felt. They were neighbors, having lived in the same neighborhood all their lives. When they were young, they had played together, but time had soured their childhood ties and they grew up as strangers. She was his longing, his heart’s desire; to her he was just an anonymous face on the street. Still, he had always loved her. That day was her funeral, and the man cleaned himself up as best he could. He shaded his reddened eyes with dark glasses and hung at the back of the crowd during her service. After the ceremony was over, after the pallbearers had lowered her casket into the ground, and after everyone had peered into the hole for one final good-bye, he stayed behind, watching the gravediggers shovel the dirt back into the hole. He stayed behind and kept vigil that day and all night. When the moon slipped below the horizon, leaving only the useless light of stars, he sat by her grave and cried.

Nobody heard him. Ikú, however, heard him.

Ikú came to him. He froze as she appeared. At first, she was nothing more than a deeper blackness within the darkness, a curious splotch in the night that could have been nothing more than his eyes blurring with tears. But the wind shifted, the leaves rustled, and something took shape in the air.

A solid form, not a dream, Ikú towered above him, a nightmarish statue. In one hand was her scythe, and the other reached out to touch him as he knelt, trembling beside his beloved’s grave. Her thin hand rested on his shoulder. He found her touch curiously soothing, like warm soup on a cold, rainy day. He lifted his shoulder and rubbed the side of his head on the back of her hand for comfort.

“So this is how it ends?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

“No, this is not how it ends.” She cupped his chin with her cool palm, lifting his face to look at him. Where her face should have been, he saw only emptiness in her hood.

“I have not come to take you. It is not your time.” He looked at her with narrowed eyes.

“Have you come to punish me for intruding on your land?” He shuddered. He knew it was taboo to be in a graveyard after dark.

“No. I have not come to punish you.” She rubbed his lower eyelid with her thumb gently and caught a tear spilling from its edge. She looked at it on her black skin as though it was a brilliant diamond and gazed at it for quite some time.

After a strained silence, he asked, “Then why have you come?”

There was no more fear, only sadness and curiosity. “Your tears for this woman have moved me. Your sadness is deep, and your love pure. It has been an eternity since I have felt sorrow and pining this intense.”

“She never knew that I loved her.” Finally, the tears came freely.

“Oh, but she does. She hears you as I hear you. The dead are always around us. Even if we can’t see them, they are there.” Ikú looked up at the stars, and the man followed her gaze with his own eyes. Such beauty, he thought, and totally useless, he felt in his despair.

Ikú shook her head in disagreement as if she heard his thoughts. “No. Beauty is never useless. Futile and fleeting, yes, but it is never useless. Did you know there is a star for every soul that has ever lived on the earth?” she asked. “And just as they burn with a cold, lonely light, every soul that has ever lived has felt loneliness at some time. I, however, feel alone every day that I exist.”

The stars didn’t seem so useless to the man anymore. “I want you to go home. What happens in a graveyard is not for mortal eyes. But tomorrow night, at midnight, I want you to come back. I will thin the veil just a bit and let you see your beloved one last time, so you may have closure.”

The man fell at Ikú’s feet. He meant to kiss them and thank her, but she melted into the night like so much black smoke. She was gone, and as she had told him, he went home.

He came back the next night. Just before midnight, he was there at her graveside, only instead of hiding in darkness he was surrounded by dozens of lit candles.

In his arms he held a simple bouquet of roses, and he waited, standing, for his beloved to appear.

“Why are you here?” a voice asked, almost a whisper. A chilly wind blew through the graveyard, and all the candles went out. There was moonlight, and it illuminated the cemetery just enough for the man to see a faint figure standing before him.

“I am happy among the dead. Are you not happy among the living?” Her form became stronger, and he saw that it was his one true love.

“I love you!” was all he could say, his heart beating wildly in his chest. He held out the roses to her, trembling with fear and desire, and although she lifted her arms to take them, they fell through her ghostly grip and rested on her grave. She smiled, but faintly.

“The flowers are beautiful, and I thank you for them, but. . . I do not love you.” His wildly beating heart stopped so quickly that the man thought that he, too, was dead. They stood in silence for what seemed an eternity.

When he continued to say nothing, the woman spoke again. “I did not love you when I was alive, and now that I am dead with no relatives to remember my name, all I want is rest and peace. But your devotion to me is so pure and gives me such light in the next world that I want to thank you for the love you offer.”

She paused for just a moment, and still the man said nothing. He looked at the ground, crushed. With narrowed eyes and pursed lips, she told him, “My father was a very wealthy man. He didn’t trust banks or vaults, and he worried that if we stored our wealth in our house, thieves would murder us in our sleep and steal what they could carry away in the night. So he hid everything far away from our home. In the ground he buried many treasures worth more than the richest king’s coffers. Before he died he told me where our family’s treasures rested, and from time to time I raided those to provide for my needs. But since my needs were simple, and because I died so young, I never took much. And in death, I have no need of treasure. I give these to you, if you will live your life and leave me to my death.”

His heart was broken, but he listened carefully as the spirit told him where the treasure was hidden. With all her secrets revealed and no more to say, her form dissolved. She was gone.

And what happened to the man? Time heals all wounds, at least those that don’t kill us, and one by one he unearthed all the contents of the treasure the woman’s spirit had left to him. No one knows if he ever found love, but everyone can assume he lived as a very wealthy man. If he had nothing else, he had that.